Souraki Warrior, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

An original antique wood engraving of a warrior of Souraki, an ethnographic costume print from Auguste Wahlen's Moeurs, usages et costumes de tous les peuples du monde, published in Brussels between 1843 and 1844. The plate is lettered "Guerrier de Souraki", and it belongs to the long Oceania sequence of the work, in which Wahlen's compilers worked through the island groups of the Pacific as the French and British voyages of the preceding decades had reported them. Souraki is an older French form and it has not been securely matched to a modern place name, so the sheet is offered as the plate letters it rather than under a modern identification. What the plate records with certainty is how a European publishing house of the 1840s presented a Pacific warrior to a reading public that would never travel there, and the figure of the warrior carried a particular weight in that literature, standing for the whole society in the way a costume book of the period habitually used a single type.

Moeurs, usages et costumes de tous les peuples du monde was published in Brussels by Auguste Wahlen at the Librairie Historique-Artistique between 1843 and 1844. The four volumes set out to describe the dress, customs, occupations and social divisions of the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania, drawing on travel narratives, earlier costume books and other sources then treated as authoritative, and they carried approximately one hundred and ninety to two hundred plates, the count varying between copies and editions.

Wahlen was the publisher and compiler rather than the artist; where a name such as Duverger, Pannemaker, Mercier, Lisbet, Markaert or Vermorcken appears on a sheet it belongs to the illustrator or the engraver, and no artist is attributed here without one.

The plates are wood engravings on paper. The images should be read as a nineteenth century European interpretation of the cultures they show rather than as a documentary record, which is a large part of what makes the series interesting to historians of the period. The sheet is uncolored, as issued, and the wood engraving prints with the crisp line and even tone that suits a simple mount and a plain frame. Plates from this series group well, and a set of four or six drawn from the Oceania section hangs better together than a single sheet on its own.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with chipping and fraying along the left edge; the image itself is clean and well printed.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.